Roy R. Manstan

Roy Manstan was born in Georgia and raised in Connecticut, receiving a B.S. degree from Lafayette College, his M.S. from the University of Connecticut, both in Mechanical Engineering, and an M.A. in Zoology from Connecticut College. He began his career at the U.S. Navy Underwater Sound Laboratory, now the Naval Undersea Warfare Center from which he retired. He completed Navy SCUBA training at the Submarine Base in Groton, CT, and was a member of the Engineering and Diving Support Unit, becoming its diving officer. The author then led this field engineering/diving team on operations in the Arctic and Africa, and to the Orkney Islands, the Azores, Italy, Bahrain, Oman, Singapore, the Philippines, the Panama Canal, St. Croix, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Bermuda and nearly every naval base along the U.S. Coast. He volunteered to assist Old Saybrook High School shop teacher Frederic Frese with the design and construction of a working replica of David Bushnell’s eighteenth-century submarine Turtle, culminating in its launch and testing at the Mystic Seaport Museum. He later helped students build a twenty-first century submarine, entered in the International Human Powered Submarine Races. Manstan published, with co-author Fred Frese, TURTLE: David Bushnell’s Revolutionary Vessel. He then published Cold Warriors: The Navy’s Engineering and Diving Support Unit, the history of his Cold War field engineering team, and The Listeners: U-boat Hunters During the Great War, the genesis of SONAR. His articles have appeared in “World War One Illustrated” and the Acoustical Society of America’s quarterly publication “Acoustics Today.”